Millikin MBA Director provides insight into retail industry
The retail industry is seeing more store closures lately due to the rising popularity of online shopping. As retail chains are closing stores around the country, central Illinois communities are dealing with the results.
In a recent interview with WAND-TV, Dr. Anthony Liberatore, director of the MBA program at Millikin University, says those closures are occurring because traditional brick-and-mortar stores struggle to compete with the low distribution costs of online retailers.
"Amazon is the most efficient distributor in the country," said Dr. Liberatore. "So when it's that cheap and that fast, that easy, it's going to knock everybody out of retail."
Dr. Liberatore noted that many consumers buy online to save increasingly valuable time.
"The value of your time is continuing to increase, and as it increases, you're going to conserve that time and use it for other things, and that's driving a lot of the change in retail," said Dr. Liberatore.